The deregulation of telephone companies in the United States and in other parts of the world has allowed greater competition among telephone service providers to provide cheaper services to customers for both domestic and international telephone calls. For a number of years, the United States government has licensed telephone businesses to resell or lease telephone lines from the larger carriers in order to help foster competition among telephone providers globally. In order to provide telephone services or leased lines at cheaper telephone rates for their customers, some of these resellers use a technique which is known in the industry as a Return Call (also called call back). A Return Call works as follows: (1) a customer dials a telephone number assigned to the customer which connects to the service provider and hangs up after one ring; (2) the service provider automatically calls back the customer within 5 to 15 seconds and emits a dial tone; (3) the customer inputs the telephone number which he or she is calling; and (4) the service provider calls the desired number over its resold or leased lines and conference calls in the customer thus establishing a telephone link between the desired destination and the customer. The cost of these calls is much lower than standard telephone calls because the lines can be leased or resold very cheaply and resellers operate with lower overhead. Any inconvenience of dialing an access number first and waiting for the automatic Return Call is mitigated by the great savings in price for the customer.
Current implementations of the Return Call strategy have some disadvantages which contribute to customers selecting other telephone options. First, the process of signing up with a Return Call service provider is normally a very lengthy and time consuming process. For example, typically customers have to first acquire a registration form from a service provider agent (which could be located in a different city or country), complete the registration information, identify a form of payment for the calls, send the forms back to the agent, wait for approval and finally receive their access number. This process could take two to three days or even over a week depending upon the form of communication used (facsimile versus mail versus air courier). This means that if new customers wanted to make a low cost Return Call, they must wait a number of days before their registration information is processed and the access number is assigned. Additionally, customers may be required to personally appear before the agent (or the Agent must appear at customer location) to verify the customer's identity for billing information which makes the process difficult.
The Internet provides a new form of communication where a person with a computer and Internet hookup can communicate with any person or company anywhere in the world almost immediately. The Internet can provide instant access to a telephone service provider and allows for the quick exchange of information. It would be advantageous for customers to be able to register quickly and to make their Return Call phone calls immediately after completing a registration form.
Conventional telephone companies know the location of the telephones upon which phone calls are made. The telephone company hooks up each telephone and sends a monthly bill to the person's house by mail. A customer typically has to wait for the bill to review the telephone calls made by a home or business. This does not allow interim auditing of the bills and a customer cannot attempt to control calling costs before the customer receives the bill for the call. It would be advantageous for a customer to get immediate access to their call detail information.
Conventional telephone companies have developed a number of different calling plans with different pricing structures for its customers. Some examples are cheaper weekend rates, having a set number of selective phone numbers which are cheaper than others and rates which decrease over a certain usage. However, these plans are limited in number and hard to understand. It would be advantageous to have a telephone service provider who could easily customize telephone costs for a particular customer.